Canadian Culture

Anne attacks Gilbert.

Canadian culture is fundamentally unserious.

Seriously.

Humor and kidlit are the two Canadian specialties. There is a reason for this.

It has to do with our democratic instincts. You start getting serious about things, and the Canadian instinct is to say “Get off your high horse!”

I recall that the rather good British 1960s series The Avengers tried to reboot as a British-Canadian co-production, featuring the intrepid Bond-like agents of Interpol operating from the environs of Toronto.

Perhaps it played well to a UK audience, but to a Canadian, it was unintentionally wildly comic. High intrigue in Mariposa? Get off your high horse!

Canadian culture is always about ordinary people in their ordinary lives, for the good and simple reason that this is all that really matters. Anything else is comic in its pretension.

And the most important events in life, as any sane person knows, take place in childhood.